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exam completed in Pinyin

This season is the thirty-first anniversary of the reinstatement of China’s national college entrance examinations after the end of the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Here’s the story of something that happened the year of the reinstatement (1977), when Zhang Huiming, a professor in the Chinese department of Xianyang Normal College, grading exams from Xianyang, Shaanxi, and its surrounding areas.

That year, after the start of the third day of work grading the exams had begun, one of the teachers on the grading team suddenly shouted in amazement, “Come look at this exam!” There before all of us was a language exam that had been answered completely in Hanyu Pinyin. Facing this situation, everyone discussed it. Right away, some said, “This is simply horsing around, putting on a show. Give it a zero!” The head of the grading team was inclined toward this idea. But Zhang Huiming insisted on first putting the exam into Chinese characters. “Who wouldn’t allow such an exam? There’s no rule against it. And Chairman Mao long ago indicted, ‘Writing should follow the world’s common Pinyin trend [i.e., use an alphabet like everyone else].'”

Everyone fell silent. Zhang Huiming took about half an hour to annotate the Hanyu Pinyin with Chinese characters. It turned out that the exam was nearly without errors in spelling or tone marks. The score, to everyone’s surprise, was 88. The teachers who corrected the exams were all convinced by this examinee of the soundness of training in Hanyu Pinyin.

A nice story. But I can’t help but note sadly that a bunch of well-educated people didn’t simply read the essay as it was written. Such are the prejudices against it. What I’d really like is a story that doesn’t treat Pinyin as if it were merely a set of training wheels.

Jan: That’s because English spelling isn’t really phonemic, it’s etymologic, meaning it is more important to be able to see where a word comes from than how it is pronounced. So, for example the spelling of a word is mostly kept when it is imported from another language. And because these other language have other spelling rules, all these differenent spellings end up being in English and make it so inconsistent.

And because there’s no central institution which could mandate a spelling reform and because variants of English pronunciation (English, Scottish, Australian, American) would be difficult to unite under a common phonemic spelling, the situation won’t change in the near future. There you have it :).

In 1956, South Koreans read mixed-script faster than pure hangul. By 1977, they read pure hangul faster. (Taylor and Taylor 1983, “The Psychology of Reading”: 90; I’m sure you’ve seen this one cited before). Reading in a way you’re not used to is hard — this is due to training, not prejudice. If you have to read pages and pages of stuff, you’d rather it be in the writing system you’re used to.